Sun, 17 Aug 2008
Free Books
The last time Pete and I visited Kathy, she gave us a big bag of Buddhist books that she cleared from her bookshelf. I took them to our Sunday meditation for the past two weeks and most of them were taken. So I'm left with the books that no one else wanted, some of which I find interesting. First, there's "Path of a Bodhisattva Warrior," which is a biography of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, together with a selection of some of his writings. The Tirteenth Dalai Lama was the one befor the current Falai Lama and he engineered a precarious independence for Tibet between China, Great Britain and Russia. For various reasons his reforms were not carried through and Tibet lost its independence. So he's both a heroic and tragic figure, sort of like Emperor Julian, the last gasp of a dying era. The other book I liked was "Treasury of Precious Qualities," which is a lam rim text from the Nyingma tradition. Lam rim is the traditional overview of sutra practices one needs to know before practicing. Each lineage has its own lam rim text and this one is from the Longchen Nyinthig lineage of Nyingma. There's a lot of similarity between lam rim texts, but also differences that make them worth reading.
